Page 31 of Three Girls Gone
“No,” Katherine said.
“Excuse me?” Malone pushed back. “He clearly has an issue with you. He came here from New York City because of you. Protection detail isn’t an option.”
“Fine.” The single word left Katherine’s lips with exasperation not acceptance. “Does that mean I can help?”
Amanda saw Katherine at the losing end of this conversation and stepped in. “Maybe if you knew why this case is so important to Katherine…” She looked at her friend.
Katherine took a deep breath and let out, “Julie’s murder is personal to me,” on a labored exhale.
Malone became stock-still. “Which I’ve gathered. Care to tell me why?”
Katherine laid it all out, then added, “Maybe that can help you understand why I can’t stop. Why Iwon’tstop.”
“I feel for what you’ve been through. I really do. But are you saying you plan to keep working on this case, regardless of whether we rope you in or not? If so, you do realize I could arrest you for interfering with a police investigation?” Malone strummed his fingers on the table, squinting and huffing a bit.
“We all know how urgent it is we get this guy,” Amanda wedged in with some finesse. “We have pressure from the media, the police chief… There’s a lot of work here, and we never bank our efforts on one thing. We’d be at a disadvantage without Katherine’s knowledge of the Gilbert case. Trent and I would need to read all the files, pull backgrounds, contact everyone. Katherine has relationships with some of these people already.”
“I hate to say this, but possibly with the killer,” Malone said.
Katherine squared her posture. “Fair enough, but no one knows this case like me.”
“Not to mention the workload on me and Amanda just withthe Tanner case,” Trent added to the defense. “We’d need to familiarize ourselves with the Gilbert investigation before we could even look for similarities or cross-reference names. And that’s assuming this person isn’t operating under an alias these days.”
“I get it. There’s a lot of work,” Malone grumbled. After a few beats, he turned to Amanda. “We might not run into his name for a while yet. If we do. We could be looking at a stranger to this family, an intruder in the Tanner home. Do we have an answer on that yet?”
“I had to leave a message with the CSIs,” she told him, while trying to bury her frustration that they hadn’t yet returned her call.
“They were dispatched there late this morning”—Malone consulted his watch—“and it’s after four in the afternoon. What could be taking them so long?”
“No idea,” she admitted.
“Well, if you don’t hear before five, let me know and I’ll make a call,” Malone told her.
“Sounds good.”
“All right, Katherine, here’s the thing,” Malone started. “From an official standpoint, I don’t want you anywhere near this,butif you could be available for consulting?—”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
“As you made quite clear,” Malone said. “Amanda and Trent, I want your focus on the Tanner case. On the upside, for this guy to take another victim and call out Katherine, he’s emotionally compromised. That means he’s bound to have screwed up somewhere along the way. Go over every bit of Hailey’s life and see what you can uncover. Then, we’ll be in a better position to spot any connections to Gilbert and put a name on this guy.”
“You got it, boss,” Amanda said. “Do you want me to get Detective Briggs from Digital on tracking the sender of thatcontact form?”
“Yeah, that’s fine. You have a solid working relationship there. As for this list of names you’ve gathered,” Malone started, turning toward Katherine, “I think male costume designers would be the best place to start.”
“We still need to confirm if the stitch looked professional or not, though that might not even matter. If I were a professional seam— Seamstress for a woman, but what is it for a guy?” Trent looked around, and Katherine stepped up.
“Just call them costume designers because they do it all,” Katherine said. “They come up with the concept and make it happen.”
“Well, I doubt judging the sewing job will get us anywhere,” Trent said. “A professional could have done a shoddy job to cover his work.”
“The only thing I worry about is you spoke to those people back in the fall too, didn’t you?” Malone asked Katherine.
“I did, but I could approach things from another angle,” she said.
Malone gestured for her to explain.
“Instead of speaking directly with them, I could call their employers from the time. It could give me a read on them without concern I’d be contacting the killer himself.”
